Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Apostrophe Blog Archive”
Rivers I Have Known
Historic —
Susquehanna: River of origin, is there such a thing as a birth river, the river in the town where I grew up, the one that flooded the streets and left us homeless for a time, that summer before my high school senior year….
Since last fall, maybe early November, I’ve been drafting (mostly) a poem a day with time off for Thanksgiving, a 60th birthday party, Christmas, and our recent delirious spate of February spring. I’d long meant to tackle such a project…
As the whole world likely knows, the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, died at the age of ninety-one last week. I was royally hooked on everything written by Salinger when I was an impressionable teen. Franny and Zooey was my favorite…
One of my resolutions for 2010 is to jump-start what I’ve taken to calling my solo MFA regimen. I know I have many gaps to fill, knowledge-wise…
They’ve started to trickle in: the not-unexpected rejection letters from the dozen or so contests I entered a few months back, inevitably telling me that my poetry manuscript has not been selected for a prize or for publication
I recently returned to writing poetry after years in the prose wilderness, writing short stories and the inevitable attempt-at-novel. While I’d never abandoned the reading poems—a love from way back when—in graduate school, my workshops and classes were focused around the craft of fiction. Oh, I waded into the…
It’s nearly the end of this windy Monday. I am listening to the wind pitch the camellia and rhododendron trees out front into the leaded glass window. This is not a trivial storm, the rain and eddies of wind are definitely mixing it up out there, like we are the bowl of eggs, waiting to be stirred, to be beat. Every now and then, too, the obligatory window-rattling sounds…
I went to a writing weekend at Esalen in Big Sur, California back in October 2003. At the final session, all the attendees gathered together and we were all asked to reflect on these questions: What do I do to keep my heart open? How do I stay in touch with the source of compassion inside myself in these difficult times?…
In March 2009, a dear friend chose to begin the process of dying “consciously.” What does that mean in this culture so notoriously youth-obsessed and morality-denying?…
In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called…
